Two Creators of the Original Doom Are Arguing About its History on Social Media
The 1993 first-person shooter Doom is legendary. Its place in history is both untouchable and inarguable. The details of that history, though, are currently being debated on social media. Not by fans, mind you, but instead by two of the very people that created it. Doom co-creator John Romero and Doom level- and game-designer Sandy Petersen took to X (formerly Twitter) to dispute each other's…
The 1993 first-person shooter Doom is a legendary game in history. Two of its creators, John Romero and Sandy Petersen, have been debating its history on social media. Petersen started the debate by posting a thread titled "How Doom changed the world." He discussed his history in the video game industry, mentioning a real-time strategy game called Command HQ released in 1990.
Petersen believed that Doom would primarily be played head-to-head due to the prevalence of modems, but he thought it bombed with only 40,000 sales. Romero responded, stating that they had sent a press release on January 1, 1993, claiming that multiplayer would be the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses worldwide, predicting that Deathmatch would be huge.
Romero questioned Petersen's memory, asserting that they had known Deathmatch would be popular from the beginning. Petersen responded, arguing that he had discussed Command HQ with Romero after joining the company and that they had all agreed Deathmatch wouldn't be that big a deal. Despite the disagreement, both Romero and Petersen expressed their fondness for Doom and its impact on the first-person shooter genre.
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